Margaret Drabble | Thornfield Hall

Time is a a capsule. It’s a bomb, it’s a card. My 1980s Webster dictionary uses two columns to define time, but what we need is Einstein.

Pop culture defines time in terms of decades and generations: the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s, as if specific trends can define a time period; and then there are the randomly assigned generations, the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, who may or may not be accurately described by eager sociological journalists.

Because of the internet, we’re always in a rush, comparing ourselves with people on social media who read 300 books a year. But Festina lente (“Hurry slowly”), as Augustus said. Speed is not the essence. Why not devote a week or a month to reading a classic? It is the reading, not the numbers, that matter. And great literature does help you slow down time.

Anyway, forget about the clock and the card. Below is a list of books that take you out of time.

The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, an experimental novel about the fragmentation of women’s lives in the 20th century. Anna Wulf, a blocked writer, experiments in her notebooks with barely fictionalized accounts of her life, ranging from her years as a communist during World War II in Africa to her literary success in London and affairs with mostly married men. The book is tied together by intermittent scenes in which Anna and her best friend, Molly, an actress, discuss their lives as “free women.”

Anything by Charlotte Bronte. Start with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (governess falls in love with Mr. Rochester but learns he has a mad wife in the attic), and then on to Villette, her best book, in which mousy, unemployed, penniless Lucy Snowe desperately travels to Belgium to seek work and finds a job as an English teacher. But the creepy headmistress spies on her, a fussy Catholic domineering male teacher becomes obsessed with her, and she falls in love with a doctor who does not find her attractive: he regards her as a friend. Much edgier than Jane Eyre, plus two psychedelic scenes, one of which occurs at night after Lucy is drugged by the headmistress.

Two Novels by Margaret Drabble. I am a great fan of Drabble, and especially admire her early work. My two favorites, published respectively in 1972 and 1975, are The Needle’s Eye and The Realms of Gold.

In The Needle’s Eye, set against a sophisticated sociopolitical background, we meet Rose, an idealistic heiress who gave away her millions to live ethically in a slum with her children. An unhappily married lawyer meets Rose at a party, and falls quietly in love. But this is not a love story.

In The Realms of Gold, Drabble again explores class and politics. Frances, a celebrity archaeologist and single mother of four children, left the provinces and invented a new life. Her career flourishes, but she suffers intermittently from depression, and has lost touch with her lover, Karel, a frazzled community college professor: a lost postcard delays their reunion. Frances also counters depression by daring to explore her roots, revisiting her unattractive hometown in the Midlands, recognizing the good and bad of the past. And part of the narrative is devoted to Frances’ second cousin, Janet Bird, a housewife with no real education or options. But for the grace of God… Time and place matter.

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina, the most sympathetic adulteress in literature, ironically falls in love with handsome Vronsky on a trip to Moscow to negotiate peace between her adulterous brother and his wife, Dolly. A huge cast of characters is affected by the affair of Anna and Vronsky, including Kitty, Dolly’s younger sister, who had thought that Vronsky would propose to her, and Levin, a landowner rejected by Kitty because of Vronsky’s flirtation. And then there is Anna’s successful but unattractive husband, Karenin, who loses the respect of colleagues because of the stigma of his wife’s adultery. Karenine punitively forbids Anna to see their son, which devastates both mother and her son.

I once read an essay by (or interview with?) Ian McEwan, who said that as he grew older he wondered how much time he had left to reread Anna Karenina. The late novelist Robert Hellenga said that he reread AK every year. I can’t compete with that, but I have read it more than once.

So these are some of my favorite books that do seem to slow down time when I read them. Do tell me about any absorbing books that do the same for you!

Some family members are happy for one’s success; others suffer from Schadenfreude.

Recently a relative expressed concern about my starting Thornfield Hall when my old blog, Mirabile Dictu, was booming. Living in X City was a huge drag already, she said, about as exciting as a glass of milk. Where would I be without my blog?

“Milk is kind of a chic thing,” I wrote back. “And we writers like to move on. Think of Colette bored out of her mind writing the Claudine books. She went on to write better books, like The Vagabond and Break of Day.”

And perhaps we don’t like to “boom.”

WHAT I’VE LOVED READING THIS WEEK. Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Waterfall, published in 1969, is a beautifully-written, if challenging short novel. In part that is because Jane, an agoraphobic poet, is not as appealing as the typical Drabble heroine. Separated from her musician husband and pregnant with their second child, Jane lives alone in run-down house in London. Housekeeping is beyond her. She has no energy. When her water breaks, she reluctantly calls her cousin Lucy because there is no one else she can bear to tell.

And so Lucy and her husband James alternate staying the night to care for Jane. And Jane and James are weirdly attracted: the two begin a semi-incestuous affair. Or are they in love?

I’ve never given birth, so I don’t understand the new mommy attraction, but James falls head over heels. And since Jane is Lucy’s double, there’s a perverse logic to it. Both women are literary–Lucy is an editor–and they resemble each other. Lucy, however, was the sexy one at Cambridge. James has little in common with either, but it doesn’t matter. He proves to be excellent with children and can do a gorgeous card trick called the Waterfall. He owns a garage and drives fast cars.

Drabble’s real strength here is in her account of Jane’s state of mind. Jane loathes Jane Austen and loves passionate Jane Eyre, and that in a way defines her. Every encounter is painful for Jane; sometimes the only person she talks to for days is a shop clerk. Finally she decides she needs to make life more normal for her son Laurie.

And in the end she made it. She decided to send Laurie to the local nursery group. She had had his name down for a year, but she had never thought she would get round to sending him. It was not losing him that she feared: it was the confrontation with the other mothers, the daily task of delivering and collecting the child, the daily greetings, the daily partings. Such a trivial decision became to her something momentous, terrifying, impossibly difficult.

The structure of this novel is gorgeously symmetrical and literary. The first-person narrator even brilliantly dissects her own literary third-person narrative.

IT WON’T, OF course, do: as an account, I mean, of what took place. I tried, I tried for so long to reconcile, to find a style that would express it, to find a system that would excuse me, to construct a new meaning, having kicked the old one out, but I couldn’t do it, so here I am, resorting to that old broken medium. Don’t let me deceive myself, I see no virtue in confusion, I see true virtue in clarity, in consistency, in communication, in honesty. Or is that too no longer true? Do I stand judged by that sentence? I cannot judge myself, I cannot condemn myself, so what can I make that will admit me and encompass me? Nothing, it seems, but a broken and fragmented piece: an event seen from angles, where there used to be one event, and one way only of enduring it.

The Waterfall is one of Drabble’s more challenging novels, but well worth reading. A post-modern Jane Eyre?